Your First Attempt Won’t Be Your Best Or Your Last
Whenever we start off on a new invention, begin to cultivate an idea or just start something new, it is important to remember:
- Dreams and ideas take time. And…
- The first attempt won’t be your best or last.
116 yrs ago today (December 17, 2020), the Wright Brothers made the first successful flight of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air plane.
It was an incredible moment. Their plane stayed in the air for 12 seconds and went 120 feet.
Think about how far we have come, and how far we can travel thanks to advances in aviation.
It all started with a 12 second flight that went 120 feet.
The lesson we should all take from that first flight is to stay inspired and stay motivated and keep trying.
Accept your success, even if it feels small. Because it every successful step brings you closer to taking a big leap.
- Published in Dreams and Goals, Entrepreneur, Motivation
The Best Elevator Pitch Does Not Pitch Your Project
Everyday Seth Godin produces helpful pearls of wisdom.
“The best elevator pitch doesn’t pitch your project. It pitches the meeting about your project. The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it. It’s not a practiced, polished turd of prose that pleases everyone on the board and your marketing team, it’s a little fractal of the entire story, something real.”- Seth Godin
I think this hits on a real truth. So many of us in business are told that our elevator pitch has to concisely tell our audience who and what we are, and what we can do in 30 seconds or less. We spend days, weeks, maybe even months perfecting a message that still doesn’t deliver its desired impact.
- Published in Entrepreneur
What Steve Jobs Teaches Us. In Business. In Government. In Life.
As a child of the 1980s, my first computer was the CoCo3 (Tandy’s Color Computer 3). That was followed by an Apple IIe. And later, a loud box-shaped Mac that graced my dorm room desk at Andover.
The innovation in computing and in technology that followed in the years since I was a wide-eyed high school student who loved computers and technology is nothing short of staggering.
In the early 1980s, my CoCo was a 512K dream box. Today, our dreams are processed in terabytes, geolocation technology, and mobile apps and devices.
Today, through technology, we can instantly communicate with the world, experience any culture, learn anything, and stretch our productivity to new limits.
Thickly layered our post-industrial, technological epoch was Steve Jobs.
The man who pioneered computers and technology, took his dream to enrich the lives of people, died yesterday. Steve Jobs was 56 years old.
And while many over the coming days will salute his career, it was his philosophy of making things that were at “the intersection of art and technology” and the concept to “think different” that really gets to the heart of what the life of Steve Jobs can teach us.
In business and in government, we need to ask ourselves, “How are we moving to create things that truly intersect with art and technology? How are we thinking differently than we have before? How are we enriching the lives of the people around us?”
Steve Jobs was undoubtedly an iconic figure. But his dreams, surrounded by successes and failures, had two common elements: ideas and decisions. Ideas around delivering technology that enhanced our lives, and decisions to think broadly and differently, and to turn those ideas into reality no matter what.
In the end, there is nothing iconic about that. It is within each of us to dream, and it is within each of us to do.
- Published in Creativity, Dreams and Goals, Entrepreneur
